Fast Fashion's Dirty Little Secret (Hint: It's Oil)

Welcome to How To Save a Planet, I'm Alex Bloomberg, this is the show where we talk about what we need to do to address climate change and how to make those things happen. Hello everyone, today I'm joined by How To Save a Planet Senior Reporter, Kendra Pierre Lewis, Kendra, do you want to tell everyone what we're talking about today? Sure, but let me demonstrate. Can you do me a favor? Sure. Can I begin by asking you to take your clothes off? Hold on, let me just file an HR complaint first. You're wearing a vest. Just the vest. Hold on a second, here we go, all right, so I got my vest, it's my vest, all right, it's off. Can you look at the label and tell me what the vest is made of? Yes, the vest is made of, oh my God, it's got like 75 gazillion tags, shell, 100% nylon. Nylon, and we don't think much about it, but fabrics like nylon, that's just a fancy way of saying oil. It's funny when you say that, I know that nylon is a synthetic fiber, and I know in some remote region of my brain that synthetic fiber often means probably made of fossil fuels, but when you put it like that, made out of oil, it really just drives it home. Yeah, and it's not just your vest. This sweater I'm wearing, when I look at the label, the first fiber listed, it's acrylic, and that's made out of oil. Everything you own that's made out of polyester or spandex or nylon or propylene or vinyl is made out of oil. Your $5 polycotton blend t-shirt half made out of oil. You're pleased from the camping store, almost completely made out of oil. Your spandex yoga pants, oil, you get the point. I do, I've gotten the oily point. I am oversimplifying a bit, it's not always made from oil, sometimes it's made from natural gas. Right, so it would not any better, it's still a fossil fuel. So, what I'm gathering so far is that all of our clothes are made of fossil fuels. Well, not all, cotton, silk, wool, no. But yes, a lot of our clothes are made of fossil fuels. By some estimates, roughly two-thirds of all of the world's clothing is made of oil. God, that is crazy. That's a staggering statistic. And you know, we're a climate show, we're not a fashion show yet. Although we're very fashionable climate show, if the people could see my vest, they would not. So, the reason we're talking about this is because our clothing has a big climate impact. The numbers are fuzzy. Most come from private sources that have not been subject to peer review. But one study in the journal Nature Review that looked just at the production side of fashion found that just the carbon emissions associated with making the materials that go into your clothes are responsible for 3.2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions. It's roughly the annual greenhouse gas emissions of all 27 countries in the European Union. Wow. You know, that includes France and Italy and Spain and Poland, so it is a lot. And we know that the type of material matters. Research suggests that the carbon footprint of a single polyester shirt is about 30% greater than that of a similar cotton shirt. In the oil in our clothes, it is a big deal. It's not the very biggest deal, like clothing isn't at the very top of the climate culprit lists. It's not like our electricity generation sector or transportation or agriculture, the three biggest sources of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But it is still a pretty big impact, and it has environmental consequences beyond just its carbon emissions. And clothing is something that you, our listeners, ask us about a lot because clothing and fashion is something we interact with every day. So Kendra, that is what we're talking about today on the program. Yeah, we're talking about our clothes, their climate impact, how they get so much oil in them, and what we can do about it. That's coming up after the break. So Kendra, you've been diving deep into this issue of our clothing and how we got to this point where two thirds of it is made from oil and our clothing and fashion in general are having a pretty significant climate impact. Yeah, and the reason our clothes now have such a big climate impact is because of this one simple fact. Clothing today is cheaper than it's ever been in human history. This is Kora Harrington, she's the author of this book called In Intimate Detail, how to choose where and love lingerie, and she runs a website called the lingerie addict. Her husband, coincidentally, also works for Spotify where we work, but I didn't know that when I reached out to tap into her expertise. And she says people today have no idea how expensive clothing needs to be. When I say that people are surprised because from a lot of people's perspective, they believe clothing should be even cheaper. They believe clothing is already overpriced. But when you think about how expensive clothing was in the past, in terms of labor and hers of materials, in terms of a final cost, there's such a dramatic difference that the gap is almost unfathomable today. I did a conversion a bit ago of what something like lace or bolts of cloth might have cost in the past, and I was getting values like, you could buy 12 horses with one piece of lace. Are you could buy, you know, 1,400 pounds of wool. So that was then, this is now massive shine haul like Friday edition. Okay, so what is this? This is a haul video. Have you ever seen a haul video? A haul H-A-U-L, a haul that, no, I have never seen one. If you are on YouTube or TikTok, you can see these haul videos. They're these videos of people going on these massive shopping sprees and then showing what they bought sort of one by one. And in this video that we're watching, you see a young woman probably at college age, she's in a room with this massive box of clothing that she's pulling the contents out of one by one. Next I got these super cute, next I got these and this top I'm obsessed with this outfit. Next I got this skirt and this top, adorable, next I got this sweater, super cute, next I got these and this top, adorable, then I got these sweats. It's just like next, next I got this, next I got this, next I got this, how long does this go? I'm noticing a theme, wow, wow, that is wild, that's a lot of clothes. It's a lot of clothes and they're buying like 90, 100 items of clothing at a time. There's just one video where girl got $2,000 worth of clothes and it was so much stuff that the box came in is about the same size as my refrigerator. Oh my god, a refrigerator box full of clothing. Yeah, and these clothes are so much cheaper than they used to be. If you look at the Sheen website where the girl in this haul video got all of those clothes, you can find brand new shirts on sale for as little as $1.75, $1.75, $1.75, oh my god. And while cheaper clothing may sound like a good thing, when it comes to climate it's actually a huge problem because it turns out that cheaper clothing gets the more of it we buy. The more we buy, the more manufacturers make and the more we throw away. All of which increases clothing's climate impact. We are buying and discarding more clothes than ever before. According to the EPA in 2018, which is the last year that they have data for or that they released data for, we threw out close to 13 million tons of clothing or 80 pounds per person. 80 pounds per person. Yes. Of clothing that we threw out, that's like we packed two gigantic overstuffed suitcases full of clothes and then instead of getting on a plane with them just threw them away. It's like we threw away one of your children. You can pick which one. Not sure how I feel about that analogy, but anyway, yes. And it's such a 180 from how we used to think about clothes according to Kora. They just didn't used to be so disposable. It used to be valuable enough, fabric used to be valuable enough to pass down and wills. It was like fine jewelry. It wasn't something that was seen as disposable. You would wear your clothing, you would use that fabric until it literally fell to pieces. If you were very wealthy, if you remember of royalty, you might pass that clothing down to your staff, to your lady's maid, and then they would repurpose that clothing. They might sell it. They might take it apart for odds and ends. And then once it fell to pieces, the ragman came and bought those scraps from you to do something else with the idea of just throwing it out because you don't like it or because someone saw it once is just not something people would do. Even the very wealthiest people who had extraordinarily massive clothing budgets weren't simply throwing out their gowns. Okay, so clothing went from something you could buy horses with to something that we buy by the refrigerator box and it went from something that we passed down in our wills to something that we throw away on average 80 pounds of per person per year. Yes. Kendra Pierre Lewis, how did this happen? Gather around young children. I will now tell you that story. A climate story time with Kendra Pierre Lewis. It's a story, Alex, that's been centuries, but we have condensed it to three simple steps. Step one, are you ready for this? I am. In the industrial revolution. Heard of it? Really? I am. So just think about how labor-intensive it is to make an item of clothing, like a simple cotton t-shirt. You have to grow the cotton, which can take close to six months, then you have to pick the cotton, which is incredibly time-consuming and an incredibly difficult labor. We know from much of US history, for example, that picking cotton was done by enslaved people as a way of making the labor cheaper and production more profitable. People forget that slavery in the US was a way to maximize profits. Exactly. It was this brutal coercion of people to do this incredibly, incredibly hard labor. But once you have the fiber from the cotton, you're not done yet. You've only really just begun. You still have to turn that cotton into a yarn or a thread and then weave that yarn into a fabric and then cut and sew that fabric into a shirt. And each step takes enormous time. Before the industrial revolution, it also took incredible skill. It used to be that each step of that had its own artisan. But then, of course, the industrial revolution automated all of that and the machines got better and faster, and the time and human effort that went into each item of clothing collapsed dramatically. And over time, agriculture got mechanized too. Tractor is combine harvesters and so on made the agricultural work faster. All of that meant that by the mid-20th century, the price of clothing had dropped significantly. But it was still nowhere near a sheep us today, which meant people just didn't own as many clothes. One example of this is this magazine I've been obsessed with since I first saw it more than 10 years ago. It's this image from 1941, and it was published in this magazine called Design for Living, the magazine for Young Moderns. The magazine for Young Moderns. Young Moderns? But it's kind of like an early iteration of a magazine like Teen Vogue. Right. And I'm looking at this right now, and it's this very well-done graphic. The title of the graphic is Miss Average College Girl tells the maximum and minimum size of her wardrobe. And then it's got all these items that would be in a Miss Average College Girl's wardrobe, I guess. And it's like evening dresses, pairs of shoes, skirts. And then there's these things called Boyfriends, which I'm assuming is a kind of sweater. It is a kind of sweater. Right. So anyway, each one of these items of clothing has its own graphic, and then they're sort of stacked in these little bar graphs, sort of like with the maximum or minimum. So which college has the minimum and maximum of these kinds of items of clothing? And the thing that stands out when you look at this is how few clothes people still had. Like some girls had as few as three skirts in an era where that's mostly what they were wearing. Right. And the article who's on to say that Miss Average College Girl, which given the era, would likely have been someone who's relatively affluent, spent $240 a year on clothes. Right. And 2, that would be about $45.00. That's a lot of money. Yeah. And part of the reason they were so expensive then was because we still needed a lot of people for this one crucial step. Every garment, no matter how simple or how complicated the actual sewing of clothing, that's not automated. It's not the case that you type a command into a computer, you type a command into a robot. And then a minute later on the other side comes a finished blouse or a finished coat or a finished shirt. The skill required to sew a garment together, we don't have machines that can do that. We had automated every part of the process that we could. And even the parts that we couldn't like sewing, we had made more efficient with things like sewing machines. And even then clothing was still pretty expensive. So that brings us to step two, which happened after 1941. So step two, globalization. Yeah. Globalization. So with step one, the Industrial Revolution, we'd replaced human labor with machines. And now with globalization, we replaced that remaining human labor with cheaper human labor. Exactly. Beginning in the 1970s and really taking off in the 1990s, one trade was changed. We made clothes cheaper by outsourcing all of that sewing, all of that textile development to the global south. And in my previous job as the host of the Planet Money Podcast, we did a big project about this, where we basically followed a t-shirt around the world as it got made, and that project was based on this great book by Pietro Reveli called The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy. Definitely worth checking out. Yeah, I listened to that series recently for the first time since it aired. It holds up. Good job. Oh, good. And as you know, the reason moving things overseas made clothes so much cheaper was labor costs. So take Bangladesh, a lot of clothes are made there. One study found that on average they were paid about $99 a month with a six-year work rate, which by US standards is a really, really low wage. And those incredibly low wages meant that a ton of garment work previously done in the US was moved overseas. So in the late 1970s, if you went to the store, you'd find that about 75% of the clothes there was made in the United States. But today, less than 3% is. And that shift had a huge impact on the cost of our clothes. I looked up Euro of labor statistics data. And remember in that magazine I showed you how a single college student in 1941 was spending around $4,500 a year on her clothes. Yeah, Miss Average College Girl. Yes, her. By 1985, entire families could close themselves for far less, just $3,700 in today's dollars. So you could outfit a family in 1985 for less than it cost to clothe an individual in 1941. Yeah. After globalization, really, takes off, clothes just kept getting even cheaper. By 2010, the average family was spending about $2,200 a year or 1,500 less than they were spending back in 1985. And as we know from the waste data that you mentioned earlier, despite the fact that families were spending less, they were buying more. So those are the first two steps in our centuries long march toward incredibly cheap disposable clothing. Step one, automation, step two, globalization. So now we get to the third step, which is where oil enters the picture and our clothes. It has to do with this. The most popular garment that a woman in high school or college wanted to wear was hot pants in the summertime. Hot pants? Hot pants. Step three is hot pants. And I will tell you more about why that is after the break. Welcome back. We are talking about the impact of fashion on the climate and specifically about how our clothing got really cheap, which caused us to buy more and more of it, which drove greenhouse gas emissions from clothing manufacturing ever higher. So we mentioned this journey to how our clothes got to cheap had three steps. And we've covered two of them, industrialization and globalization. And now we're on to step three, which is all about hot pants. Okay. Explain yourself. Okay. So to understand the role of hot pants in all of this, I'm going to take you to New York City's garment district, the heart of which is just south of Times Square. This area used to be teaming with textile stores and factories. And to get a lay of the land, I did what any tourist would do. I took a walking tour, a man by the name of Mike Keyback, this periodic tours of the garment district. And on a very frigid day in January, it was so cold, Alex, it was so cold. I joined him on one of his tours. I have been working in this neighborhood since 1964. Now probably some of you weren't even born then, both of you, right? 64, I started when I got out of the army, the effort. I came to work here in this Shmata business. Shmata is a Yiddish word, which is the only language that my people spoke when they came to this country from East and Europe. Shmata is a Yiddish word for fabric. I spent my career in a Shmata business, meaning I sold fabric for underwear, tuxedos and regs. Shmata. Mike had lots of stories of what it used to be like here before the industry was sent overseas. But there's one story in particular that fills in the missing link of how we got to the situation with our clothes today. And it has to do with this trend that he benefited from in the 1970s. The most popular garment that a woman in high school or college wanted to wear was hot pants in the summertime, made out of suede. And suede was costing around $15 of a yard, a square yard while 15 dollars in the 1970s is worth a little bit over $100 today. Wow. I know it's so expensive and we're talking wholesale prices. The prices of companies were paying for the fabric before they added the labor cost of cutting and sewing that leather into shorts and a markup for profit. So if you the shopper wanted to be trendy and wear those shorts, it was likely going to cost you. That is until the company Mike was working for at the time came up with an alternative. We made a synthetic fabric. We called it Vel Penet. Take a piece of fabric and put on it a coating of glue. And into that glue inject synthetic fibers like a half inch or three quarters of an inch and you have a lure. And if you put them in on an angle into that glue, the lure has direction. We went out and we tried to sell that to row people. They didn't want to have anything to do with synthetic lure. But when we shorten the height of the fibers to a eighth of an inch and we injected it into that glue, we had suede, suede $15 a yard. We were selling for $1.5 a yard, one fifth of the price of regular suede. You know what happened to the whole industry that was using suede? They went crazy. They were knocking at our door. Give me that fake suede. Did they give a hoop that our fake suede rubbed off after five washes that was gone? We wrote down. Not recommended for where after five washings. They didn't care. They bought it like crazy. And the thing that I want you to pay attention to is that phrase, he said, "Synthetic fibers. The original hot pants were made of suede and suede is a natural fiber. It's made from animal hides like sheep." What he was selling was not that. It was synthetic. And synthetic in this case means basically plastic, which comes from fossil fuels. Initially, there was only natural fibers, cotton wool, silk, and flax and those kind of things. Synthetic fiber, you get from a liquid petroleum base that goes through in a liquid form. It goes through, think of a shower head, and the shower head's got holes in it. And the diameter of the hose that the shower has, when you put that liquid into the top of it, and it comes out, the diameter determines the width of the fiber that comes through, it's called the filament fiber. It has no end and no beginning. It just goes. You start. It has a beginning and no end until you shut off the liquid and then it stops being coming out. It's in liquid comes out of fiber in simplified terms. So instead of turning some sort of plant-based or animal-based thing into thread, like we do with cotton or wool, synthetic fibers, they start out as a liquid. They're poured through this device to make those strands. Yeah, it's a little bit like making spaghetti. Right. And then those strands, those individual strands of the synthetic fiber of the polyester whatever are woven then into fabric. Exactly. And in the middle of the 20th century, it was kind of a great time to be in the synthetic fabric inventing business. Nylon was invented in 1939, polyester was invented in 1941, and so was acrylic, which is a dupe for cotton and wool, especially in sweaters. Along with the rise of these synthetic fibers, also came the rise in semi-synthetic fibers. We're talking about your rayons, also known as viscose in acetate. They are made from a natural base, like wood or bamboo. But to turn them into fabric often involves a high amount of synthetic additives, which largely come from fossil fuels. And the process of making those chemicals can also emit a lot of greenhouse gases. Right. But the reason people were making them is that they filled a lot of needs, right? No, it's because they wanted to destroy the planet. They didn't want to. So more seriously, part of it was a labor issue, sharecropping, which in many ways was an extension of slavery, still produced a lot of the cotton in the United States through the middle of last century. And it started eroding in the wake of the Great Depression for a variety of reasons, including field workers bonding together to push for their rights. And so synthetic fibers were one way of not having to worry about the systems, because oil is seen as stable. And the other part of it was that once they started making these synthetic fibers, all of a sudden you could make materials act in ways that hadn't been possible before. Here's Mike again. In a hundred percent cotton shirt, you take it out of the washer or the dryer, and it needs to be ironed. You take out a 50/50 polyester and cotton shirt, out of the dryer, and you put on a hanger, you don't even have to iron it. Trust me, you got a teenager who needs a white shirt for school every day. You want to have a poly cotton shirt. So there's plenty of benefits. Another benefit, synthetic materials can stretch. One of the first big synthetic items of clothing was stockings. But with the advent, especially by dupe hunt of nylon before World War I, that they use mainly to make power shoots. And then they decided it would make nice stockings for women with the seam in the back. I still remember my mother had nylon stocked. That had to be the seam had to be lined up there. And today, of course, we've graduated from Nylons to Spandex and Elastic, all these different kinds of stretchy synthetic fibers. Yeah. They're also in our jeans, our beloved yoga pants, all of their flexibility to synthetic fibers. They're also all over Outdoor Gear because it's easier to make lightweight waterproof fabrics that way. Right. But they also have another benefit, at least for companies. They're cheaper. Remember Mike's fake, suede hot pants? We made so much money because that dollar and a half that we sold it for was double what it cost us to make. So we made a hundred percent profit. It wasn't as strong and it wasn't as durable, but it looked the same. And who cares if it looks the same. And so we did, we did very well and then we made a lot of money. I got a house out of it. I was making sixteen thousand dollars a year salary and I went up to twenty thousand dollars a year salary, which enabled me in 1973 to buy my wife to buy a house. No, it was awesome. Yeah, it was a fun experience. Synthetic fibers, but Mike a house. It did. And it's worth pointing out that in the 1970s, it was kind of the heyday of polyester and synthetic fibers. After that period, polyester in particular and synthetics fell out of favor for a little bit. There was this belief, especially with polyester, that the fabrics didn't breathe. Yeah, I remember polyester was sort of like the butt of a joke. There was like this movie, polyester, actually, that was just sort of like this can't be a movie, but like it was synonymous with sort of like, can't be bargain basement, you know, not fashionable. A acrylic was sort of the same thing. It was the thing that you would see in the sort of sales bins. But the company's kept working at it and the fibers got better. You couldn't necessarily tell at a glance that they were synthetic and we also got a lot more blended fabric like the polycotton blends that Mike mentioned and people started being more willing to buy it. This enabled the rise of brands like Zara and H&M and that company Sheen were the woman in the haul video about all of her clothes. It's what's called fast fashion. These companies take advantage of that combination of industrialization, globalization, and the rise of synthetic fibers to make clothes that look trendy but are also really, really cheap. Where a shirt is no longer something that you pass down in a will and it's now something that you buy online for $1.75 less than a cup of coffee, something you buy by the pound. The part of the reason that this is happening that we are buying so much more clothing isn't just because we're hungry for the latest trends or new styles. Core Harrington, who we talked to earlier, said that there's been this shift that instead of seeing clothes as adorable good, the way she described in the beginning of the episode, a lot of companies started to see it as a disposable good. If you look at what Mike's company did in the 1970s, making it a fabric that was only good for five washes, it was rare enough that they felt the need to warn people. Now, if you read industry material, that idea is pretty close to industry standard practice. According to one 2015 study in the journal fashion theory, a lot of clothing, it's designed to last no more than 10 washes. 10 washes. It's basically you're just like you wear it 10 times and you're done. Right, the clothes fall apart or they just don't look good anymore. They don't hang right or they don't quite fit right after you've washed it. That shift according to Kura is really recent and it's completely in tandem with the ubiquity of fast fashion. Even when you're looking at the quality of fabric 10 or 15 years ago, there's been a dramatic difference. It's very easy to tell by touch what I've owned for more than a decade and what I haven't. I was wearing my t-shirt from my high school homecoming senior year, cotton t-shirt, and the quality of that cotton fabric, I don't have it. I don't have that in my modern day t-shirts and that shirt is 20 years old. I have silk from 10 or 15 years ago where the quality of the silk fabric has changed. It's absolutely true when we're talking about how things today don't last as long. They're not well as made. The fibers themselves often aren't as high quality and then the end fabric isn't as high quality and then the actual stitching together isn't as high quality and then all of that results in a garment that falls apart faster. People frequently want to blame the manufacturers for cutting corners and there's definitely something to that. I'm not going to take the stance that factories are blamed with or manufacturers are blamed with, obviously, but I think it's also worth keeping in mind that cheapening is also in response to people's demands. If people are demanding $5 t-shirts where there's only so much quality you're going to get for $5. So fossil fuels have allowed companies to make cheaper and more disposable clothing and people have shown over time that when they choose between paying more and buying fewer high quality things and paying less and buying lower, more disposable things, we opt for cheap and more and more disposable, which means we're buying more and more things made of oil and the more we're willing to buy the more companies make, meaning carbon emissions from the clothing industry seems like they're on a path to continue to rise. I guess, unless we do something about this, so what do we do about this, Kendra? We need clothes, right? I am going on record as saying I am proclose and one of the suggestions that comes up a lot is why don't we just recycle our clothes? Right. I reached out to Jessica Schreiber, she used to work for the City of New York's Department of Sanitation overseeing its clothing and electronic waste recycling. And what she saw disturbed her enough that she founded a nonprofit called Fabscrap to reduce textile waste. And this is what she had to say about recycling clothes. I think it's important to know recycling is really downcycling. It's shredded and becomes insulation or carpet padding or mattress stuff. True recycling would be fabric back in the fabric and I think we're probably still like 5 or 10 years from that being really a solution at scale. So if you take a pair of old pants or whatever and put it in a textile recycling bin, like there's one of those in the basement of my building, it's not going to sort of be reincarnated as another shirt or pair of pants. Now textile recycling is really hard. Some of it is because certain materials just aren't designed to be recycled. And some of it's because a lot of fabric is a mix of materials. My sweater for example, it's actually a mix of acrylic nylon and spandex and that's really hard to break apart to recycle. In the best case scenario, our clothes are being turned into insulation or mattress stuffing. And once it's done serving that purpose, it'll probably be thrown out. So it's not bad to do it. It is better that it has a new life as mattress stuffing, but it's not turning off the tap of newly produced clothes. You're not turning clothes back into clothes. It's just delaying how quickly stuff enters the landfill. When you recycle an aluminum can, it turns back into a can. You're not using new aluminum to make a can, you're sort of saving that stuff. Not the same thing with clothing. Not the same thing with clothes. And then there's this other problem, which is not everything can be down-cycled. Spandex, which can be thought of more as a glue than a fiber, poses a unique problem. We can shred everything as long as there's no spandex. So we're sorting out spandex elastic elastic, like anything in that rubber family because it melts during the shredding process. It's not a real fiber, it's just an additive to the fabric. So we're pulling out anything with spandex, but otherwise everything else can be shredded. It feels like everything has spandex in it, though. No, I mean, it's surprising sometimes what we get that has spandex in it, things you wouldn't expect, like wool blends with spandex. So we keep all of that for reuse because if you can't be recycled, we encourage people to take that, because it's free and because we don't have a good way to recycle it. So that's like the greenest material that they could upcycle. Which brings us back to your vest. My vest. We're back at my vest. We are back at your vest. Do I have to get rid of my vest? Yes. No. I love my vest. No. How often would you say you wear your vest? In the winter, like I probably was wearing it every day. I love it. I never want to be out of it. How long have you had your vest? I think I bought it two winters ago. Oh, okay. Great. That is exactly what I want to hear. Don't get rid of it. Keep wearing it. That's kind of the point. The solution is not to get rid of synthetic materials, like I hike. I camp. They're really useful in that regard. But I'm not buying a new tent every other week. The goal is to make sure that the things we buy, that they're well made, and that we can hold on to them for a really long time, or that if for whatever reason we can't, maybe we gain weight, maybe we lose weight, we can pass it down and someone else will still see the value in that item. Yeah. It's sort of how I think about plastic. Plastic is really useful in lots of different ways, right? It's in lots of things that we use every day. It's in all the equipment that we're recording, it's in our computers, et cetera. And it's filling a need that plastic is pretty uniquely capable of filling. The problem is disposable plastic, single-use plastic, shrink wrap to wrap our cardboard boxes, et cetera. We have made our clothes sort of like disposable plastic. Right. Because they're oil-based, they also don't degrade. They just sort of hang out in the environment for really, really, really long time. Okay. So recycling doesn't seem like the solution, at least not yet. What is the solution? What can we do about it? What, in other words, are some calls to action? So I would say that the solutions have kind of two strands. The first is somewhat individualistic, which I know is rare for how to save a planet, and the second is systemic. On an individual level, we need to buy a few of your clothes and take better care of them. By less care and more. Exactly. But this can be hard, right? Because clothing manufacturers have really pushed the idea that shopping for clothing is almost a hobby. And there is something undeniably appealing about this idea of being able to buy all these new clothes. Like, in those haul videos, I understand the appeal of that. I think there's just something human that all of us have that, like, urge to try this new thing. Yeah. And the clothing brands and manufacturers are making tons of new things to basically tempt us in this way. In 2019, I reached out to Zara for a story and asked some how many designs they make in a year. And they told me 20,000 designs. About articles of clothing, just the designs. Fashion Nova, which is another fast fashion brand, allegedly releases even more. About a thousand designs a week, or 52,000 designs a year. And she in, she in, which is online only, supposedly goes even further. They apparently release up to a thousand designs a day. Oh, my God. So it's just, like, really just, like, sort of feeding this desire that people have for, like, something new, something new every day. And it becomes compulsive because they need to check every day. So figuring out how to lessen that compulsion to, like, sort of, reduce that desire is good for the planet. And I'm going to go ahead and live and say, it's probably good for us as people, right? In my experience, increasing your consumption beyond a certain point does not increase happiness. And in fact, I'd actually heard it. Speak for yourself, I'm scourgement duck for years swimming in my piles of gold. So if you're someone who sees yourself in those TikTok haul videos and don't like what you're seeing, Dr. Emma Kid is a researcher at Glasgow, Caledonian University in Scotland. And she runs a 12 week fashion detox program designed to help people actually want to shop less. It's free. And early research suggests that not only did it help people buy fewer clothes, but it cut down on their overconsumption more broadly in other areas will include a link to the Fashion Detox project in the show now. And, you know, some people may be like, I am the farthest thing from someone who would ever go on a haul video. The reason I'm buying more than I want to buy is because it's core noted. The things I'm buying just don't last as long. Right. Don't worry, we have some tips for you. A few years ago, I wrote a guide on how to pick out clothes that are built to last. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And then both Jessica and Cora noted that whatever clothes we are buying, we need to do a better job of taking care of them. We can't just dump them in the washing machine on hot and expect them to last a long time. Oh. But I like jumping in them because that's how they get done faster that way. Well, for starters, you're on colds, but, um, right. Most importantly, stop putting so much of our clothes in the dryer. It just makes our clothes wear out faster. Getting drying is in general better for your clothes. And because you're not using electricity, it's also better for the planet. If you cannot commit to hanging drying all of your clothes, which I get it at minimum, stop putting your very stretchy things in the dryer because the heat from the dryer melts up the spandex it weakens it. And when you do wash your clothes, especially your synthetics, stick them in what's called a guppy friend, a guppy friend. Yeah. Essentially like a bag that's made to catch the bits of your fabric that rub off in the wash without the guppy bag. These little bits just wash out into the general waste dream and eventually end up in the ocean. Right. Okay. So use a guppy friend and it keeps sort of the plastic from your clothes from getting in the ocean. Yeah. And if you're fancy enough to not be me and on your own washing machine, you can also put a filter. There are filters that you can buy that does that instead of the guppy bag. But all of this obsession with the washing machine reminds me that as a rule, we've need to wash our clothes less, especially our jeans. Oh, that's what I'm already doing. Just out of pure sloth. washing. I love it. I need a bag less washing also wears your clothes out more quickly. And often they don't need to be washed as often as we're washing them. Please don't tell my care of being parents that I am disseminating this advice to me. But also please do still wash your drawers. You know, like the things that are closest to your body, you should be washed more often than the things that are furthest from your body. Exactly. Jeans, not so much. Underwear. Wash your underwear. Please wash your drawers. If you take one thing away from this episode, okay, so these are all very practical bits of advice. But as we said, they're pretty individualistic. Kind of every single listener of how to save a planet takes this advice, it's not going to make a huge dent in the sort of the global problem. So are their systemic solutions? Are there actions that we can take that push for a more sort of like systemic or sort of like holistic approach so that the clothes we buy aren't so prone to just fall apart? Yeah. So more and more countries and more and more activists are pushing for something called extended producer responsibility laws. Extended producer responsibility. Basically, sort of like the people who make it have to deal with the waste from it, polluter pays basically. Yeah. Right now we have a system where fossil fuel and fashion companies basically make cheap clothes and the cost of that is wasted on everyone else. Extended producer responsibility basically says that companies have to design things better to reduce waste and that they are on the hook for the cost of disposal at the end of the life of the garment. Several countries are beginning to start floating these kinds of rules. And I will include links to some of the language in the show notes so that you can get ideas from it. And that makes a lot of sense as an idea basically like the clothes appear cheap but we all know there are costs, costs in pollution, costs in waste, cost in greenhouse gas emissions that are not reflected in the three dollars that you paid for that shirt. And so these laws would sort of like internalize the cost of all those external costs. Which would mean we should say our clothing would get a little bit more expensive. It would, but and this is something I've been thinking about a lot in the course of doing this. One of the other benefits is that right now, thrift stores are garbage. Right. And slightly. I know. It's really funny. You go to the thrift stores and the things that people are pulling or the things from the 50, 60s and some of these because of and even the 80s because those are the things that were still reasonably well constructed. Right. And so yes, if you are buying things new, it will probably get more expensive. But it also means that like the secondary market will be better. Right. And, you know, when you look at how cheap clothes have gotten starting back to when they were passed down and wills to where they are today, if it means that like you buy one or two items less a year, it doesn't seem like that's the end of the world. And the other thing that I've been thinking about a lot is, you know, often people would be like, well, what about the lowest income people? And that's a real argument. But the flip side of that is those are also the same people who are currently being poisoned by the protection of these chemicals and these materials that we're using to make really cheap clothes. And so I think the target ideally is the person who's on tiktok to my $2,000 haul video. The ideally we will fix other structures around wage and around equity to make it so that lower income people can afford clothing. Yes. Alright, all that we have left is the credits. How to save a planet is a Spotify original podcast and Gimlet production. It's hosted by me, Alex Bloomberg. This episode was produced by Kendra Peer Lewis. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Rachel Waldholz, Anna Lad, Hannah Chin and Daniel Ackerman, our supervising producer is Caitlin Bogouki, our editor, is Caitlin Kenney, our intern, is Nicole Welch, sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard with the original music by Peter Leonard and Emma Munger, Bobby Lord and Billy Libby. Our fact checker for this episode is Claudia Geibb. Thanks for listening. We'll see you all next week.